


The Devil's Advocate

by Tammany



Series: Sam and Crowley [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Odd-Couple, Playing, Post-Season/Series 11, Test chapter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 02:38:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6497560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an experiment. No idea where I am going with it, or even if I am going anywhere with it. </p><p>That said, of all the "ships" available in Supernatural, I've got an odd sweet spot for Sam/Crowley. Sam needs some kind of normal abnormalcy to survive--and Crowley is so terribly, terribly hungry for the kind of quiet, abiding loyalty Sam offers. </p><p>The "resolution" I describe for Season 11 is pure imagination. If I "predicted" anything at all correctly I will be amazed. But it is an ending that would reshuffle the deck in some of the sorts of ways I think Supernatural needs be on a regular basis. Enough has to change to justify a new run of long-term arcs to resolve the feelings and new loyalties and enmities that arise with a new spin of the top. Disappearing everyone but Sam and Crowley, and in the way described, with the kinds of possible implied matchings seemed like a nice cliffhanger without having to resort to either brother dead or the entire multiverse on the edge of destruction: instead a huge implication of a new shape to how everything may tie together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil's Advocate

It was a bloody, toxic mess. But, Sam thought, when was it ever not?

He shivered where he lay sprawled. Hell, he thought—meaning the location, not just the explicative. He was in hell.

A dull blind glow still filled his eyes. He could barely see. He tried to remember what had happened.

It was complicated. He remembered that much.

He sat up, groping along the floor to find his way to anything at all. There had to be some kind of landmark. Dust gritted under his fingers. His knees hurt as he knelt on the stone floor. He swept with his right hand; swept with his left hand; crept another two steps, and repeated.

On the fifth left-hand sweep his left little finger caught up against something too clearly body-like to be anything but a body.

“Dean!”  No answer. “Cas?” Silence. Then, with greater insecurity, “Lucifer?” The body ahead made a sound—as though it stirred in uneasy sleep.

The voice was not Lucifer’s, though Sam wasn’t sure that mattered. In the end smoke had been pouring in and out of bodies like some May Dance of the Damned—ribbons furling, sinking into gaping throats, then bounding up and pouring out again, thrown from the sanctuary of a mortal body.

He inched closer, hands tracing what eyes could not make out. Quickly he was sure—the body was Crowley’s. The contents? No idea.

There were broken bones...fibula. Some ribs, judging by the flex and the unconscious groan. Radius. Blood, too—he could feel the familiar tacky cling, so constant in his life he probably ought to consider being a butcher if he ever did make it to a “normal life.” Or surgeon…

The blood shed in law was too intangible for him these days.

By now he knew whose body he’d found, but he refused to voice it even to himself until he reached the bull-heavy neck and shoulders, the thick heavy jaw and chin, the blunt nose…

Crowley.

He squinted, trying to make out the former King of Hell more clearly. All he could make out was the sense of a head lying there beneath his hands. His fingers, though, found a pulse.

Crowley, he knew, could almost remember, had gamed them again.

Crowley, he knew, could almost remember, had saved them. Again.

“Stupid demon,” he grumbled in exasperation. “You’re as bad as Cas. Don’t you know your part? Leave the hero shit to me and Dean…”

Only he knew, vaguely, that Crowley had not. He’d once more soared up from his demonic damnation to do something pure and clean and right, out of love.

For Dean?

Sam sighed. Yes. Probably for Dean. That man had  them all mad for him: angels, devils, gods. Alike.

Thinking that he remembered the vital bits. Now that had been ribbons of smoke! The critical battle when Lucifer in Dean struck the Darkness…

And the Darkness struck back.

The black smoke poured out of Dean’s mouth, reforming even as it came, taking on Lucifer’s rangy, homely form, from which the crimson smoke poured out, becoming Crowley.

Crowley, from whom the white soul-stuff poured out, turning to Cass…

From whom poured light unbearable—burning, searing Godlight.

They’d been stacked together like Russian Matryoshka dolls, with God himself hiding in the body of the least of his angels—the most flawed, simple, human of his angels.

After that was blindness, Sam thought. And sound. And then nothing.

“Dean?” he called, already sure there was no one but him and Crowley left in this Hell-dungeon. “Cas?”

No.

He drooped, but forced himself to carry on. There was a pulse in Crowley’s neck, strong and healthy. Whowever now occupied the devil’s vessel, someone was alive. Unless the empty vessel endured, scoured empty of anyone home at all.

He wanted to cry.

He wanted to sleep.

Instead he crawled around the stone floor, finding things by touch—then, as his sight slowly came back a bit, he located them visually. He came back to the body on the floor, dropping several flasks, whole lengths of what appeared to be draperies, knives. He threw what appeared to be a torturer’s robe over the figure, then silently started setting bones, and then wrapping ribs. No point for this to hurt more than it had to.

Somewhere at the end he knew—he knew with all his conviction—that Crowley had thrown himself into the Godlight to save them all.

When he was as done as he could manage given his own shape, he poured water from one flask into the devil’s mouth, a drip at a time, working it down his throat, making sure he swallowed. Then he guzzled down great mouthfuls himself, used the last few drops to wipe away grime from his face—and lay beside Crowley, holding him close, each just barely warmed by the scraps of robe that covered them.

 

“Hurts,” Crowley growled. Then, louder, “HURTS. Bloody fucking hell, what is wrong with me? Ouch, dammit. Where is my mother when you could really use her?”

Rowena made a mean salve, even if Crowley wished he didn’t know. He could use a salve right about now.

He could not remember the last time he’d hurt this way. Centuries, maybe? He tried to sit up, only to find himself trapped by a long arm in flannel. He hardly had to think—it was either Moose or Squirrel, after all. Flannel like that took a really special kind of tastelessness and layers of monster-weight gore to achieve that particular used-to-death look.

He frowned, looking down, finding his companion. “Moose?”

Moose grunted—quite moose-like—and pulled closer, refusing to wake.

Crowley growled, and exerted just a bit of magic to shift the great lout.

Well. He tried to exert a bit of magic. Nothing flared. Nothing moved. There he was, still pinned by the giant. He huffed, and squirmed. Nope. No liberty…

He groped blindly, found a flask, shook it, and swore. Empty. He twisted in place, stretched farther, groped, touched. Another flask. He pulled it over, first by little more than the friction of a single finger, then far more firmly. Ache or no ache, oddly fashioned splint or no, he needed water. He got it close, worried the lid off with his teeth, and gulped.

It flowed down his throat like a blessing, which ought to have worried him or at least raised suspicions, but there it was—he was in pain and concussed and not at anything like his best. Rather than wondering what kind of water he had, he just prodded Moose over on his side, and began to trickle a drop or two into his companion’s mouth.

Ah—no need. Moose woke barely enough to grab the flask, prop himself semi-upright, and swallow gulp after gulp.

Good thing it was a large flask, Crowley thought wryly, recovering the flask and capping it again. He tried one more time to get free of Moose’s grip, and failed. Too tired… Too weak.

He dropped back down to the floor, groped until he found a length of drape, and tossed it over his and Moose’s shoulders. He turned until he could press his face into Moose’s hard skull, curled one protective arm over Moose’s shoulders, and fell asleep.

 

Sam woke to find Crowley tucked like a kitten in the arch of Sam’s arms. Not that he could confirm it for several minutes—the two of them were tangled in what he could now see was a gaudy streamer of linen, now stained with dirt and blood and what was probably smoke and ichor. He pushed it aside and leaned back.

Crowley mourned in his sleep, hands uncrossing from his chest and searching.

Sam crept further back. After all—Crowley. It never did to trust Crowley. It never did to feel sorry for him. Crowley himself would not feel sorry for Crowley—or at least, not on any of the grounds he deserved a bit of sorrow. Sam wasn’t about to start to try.

He managed to slip free, and stood.  He found he was in surprisingly good shape. He padded silently around the dungeon room, trying to reconstruct what had happened. In spite of vast experience and having been there into the bargain, what his mental reconstruction said was, “Big fight, then bang.” And he and Crowley appeared to be who was left.

“Dean?” he called, forlornly.

There had been Godlight, pouring out of Cass.

Cass, the Lord Almighty’s Donkey. Of course.

But Sam couldn’t figure out how it had all resolved. Did Darkness win?

He felt the tears trickle as he thought of Dean, one human figure in that chaos of Gods and Powers. All he was really sure of was that Dean had stepped between Godlight and the Darkness.

Crowley had thrown himself between Godlight and Dean, thrusting Cas out of the way as they competed for the honors of saving the beloved Winchester…

He knew Crowley had been hit—and hit again as Lucifer rose and aimed for his father.

What do they say? Family fights are always the worst? Stay away from “domestics”?

Too late for that now.

All he knew was that they were gone, and he and Crowley were alone in the guts of hell.

He found another flask, and grimaced. They’d brought enough holy water to scour all Hell with, hadn’t they? Holy water and salt and God’s Hands and scriptures…including some damned bit of Apocrypha by Metatron. He cracked the bottle’s seal, and drank, hoping any blessing remaining helped heal his hurts—the scrapes and bruises and sprains outside, the loneliness within.

Where to go, though?

“That underground Batcave of yours, that’s where,” Crowley growled, rising. “Until we know what’s going on and who survived that, it’s got the only protections we can trust.” The man had woken and risen. He leaned heavily on the heel of one palms, rubbing grit from his eyes with the other hand. “Bugger-all, that was a ride. NO idea how I’m not dead.”

“God loves you,” Sam said, grinning slightly as disgust covered Crowley’s face.

“Har-de-har-har-har,” Crowley said, and rose in shaky legs.

“No, you need a wheelchair,” Sam said, tucking himself up under Crowley’s arm. Their respective heights made the maneuver both difficult and supremely uncomfortable. Crowley swore, Sam laughed, and they rearranged themselves, allowing  certain amount of freedom each other, finally coming to a stable point.

“Water,” Crowley croaked, tugging the flask from Sam’s free hand. He was a third swallow into it before Sam began to squall and try to wrest the bottle away. He managed one more gulp, then pulled off, scowling. “Thirsty!”

“Holy Water!” Sam shouted back just as unsettled, then, as he realized that all the water he had poured into the demon had to have been similarly blessed.

“And, yet, I live,” Crowley said, all irony and sarcasm. “I promise you, there’s a mistake. I am clearly alive, and would not suggest trying to change it. If it were holy water I’d have been dead before I started to heal.”

“Yet here you are. And I promise, we didn’t bring anything but holy water.”

Crowley grunted dubiously, and forced himself into an upright position, moving gingerly. He snatched the flask from Sam, eased toward it, twisted the top off, and tested his lip against the contents.

‘Water,” he said, and gulped.

Sam, already familiar with the flask, studied him frowning. When he was done he took the flask away and turned it, showing the cross marked on it. “Holy water.”

Crowley flinched, then shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Maybe a miracle occurred, like in all the holy stories. Didn’t leave the injured healed, though.”

“Fussy—fussy—fussy. We are here, alive, with Lucifer and Amara and God all gone. I won’t argue with that.”

“Dean’s gone, too.” Crowley’s face did that thing he did—a thing that always amused and annoyed Sam a bit. “He’ll be back.”

He’d better be, both men thought.

They gathered what they could from the dungeon. They ransacked hell, which they found open and empty. They collected magic implements left behind—Crowley limping and sore and clucking like a mother hen at the thought of leaving hell unguarded.

“Lock it up behind you when you go,” Sam grumbled. “You have to have some kind of spell for that.”

Crowley looked uneasy. “Having a bit of trouble with that,” he said. “I think I overextended.”

‘Now you tell me.” Sam sighed, but worked out a set of sigils they could use just drawing on him.

They exited hell into an alley Sam recognized only too well. He set the sigil, Crowley leaning against the far wall of the alley, panting and weary.

“It’s only a little way to Baby,” Sam said, glad he always carried spare keys these days.

Crowley grunted, nodded, and didn’t much seem to care. He limped beside Sam until they reached the cherished Impala. He leaned against the passenger side frame while Sam packed up the booty in the trunk.

Sam, frowning, nudged him aside—and, when Crowley just stared blankly, he poured the sturdy little devil into the passenger seat, before going to the driver’s side.

He missed Dean, he thought.

“Where’s Dean?” Crowley asked, eye-lids sagging, too near sleep to do more than sprawl.

“I don’t know,” Sam said, voice tight. “The last I knew he went toward Amara, God tried to ice us all—and you and Cas both fought for the honor of the save. You won.”

“I never,” Crowley husked—but his heart wasn’t in it. Still—“If I’d won, I’d be gone, not Cas. Godfire—that’s more than I can handle…” His voice was furry with exhaustion.

“Don’t ask me,” Sam said. “I didn’t last past that point myself.” He turned the key. By the time he’d safely negotiated the alley and eased Baby onto the road, Crowley was asleep.

They drove through the afternoon. Sam stopped twice to pick up sodas. Crowley woke only long enough to open his colas, pour them down his throat, and drop back into restless sleep.

He’d been injured, Sam reminded himself. He could still feel Crowley’s flesh under his fingers as he’d set and bound the bones, wrapped the ribs, wiped the devil’s face. The linen drapes had scratched against Crowley’s perpetual five-o’clock shadow. He’d clung tight when Sam settled him back in.

Sam seldom bothered to feel much empathy for Crowley. Dean was the one who got tangled in the big stuff. Sam figured his role was sacrificial offering—certainly none of the wooo-wooo people seemed to want to “foster a relationship” with him, unless you counted Lucifer and his depraved pleasure in playing with his food. No—that Was Dean’s place. Beloved of Angels. Cherished BFF of devils. Main Squeeze of God’s Own Sister. Favorite of God. Even Death had seemed to like Dean…

Ruby had loved him, his mind whispered…

Ruby loved everyone—for a price, he said, slamming the lid shut on those memories.

Which left Sam off the hook, he reminded himself. He wasn’t drawn into that stuff the same way Dean was. He could keep a bit of a clear head about Joe-Palooka Angels and Hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold succubii, and missing Gods, and Anger-Issue Arch-devils…. He didn’t have to care about them. He didn’t have to worry about them.

Even about the git sleeping so heavily in the other side of Baby.

He tried to imagine what kind of fool would fall in love with Crowley: poor, damaged Crowley, Rowena’s baby-boy Crowley, the braggart, the bitter, the ego-scarred, the idiot…

He’d be a terrible person to love, Sam thought. Worse than Dean, and for far too many of the same kinds of reason. He’d always be looking for reassurance without admitting that was what he wanted. He’d always be caught in old hurts and angers. He’d need a lover who could endure him, laugh at him, forgive him…

Maybe Cas, Sam thought, with a crooked smile. Cas could forgive anything.

But he knew Cas was a bad choice. Cas was a lost child, and always would be.

Cas didn’t have the strength to be Crowley’s one sure thing.

He sighed.

Probably no one did.

He never asked himself, as he drove them to the Men of Letters hideaway, why he cared.

Nor did he ask himself why, when he helped Crowley wrestle himself onto a spare bed, he smiled at the fingers tight around his wrist, fighting not to let go.

 


End file.
